‘The emphasis on individual ownership of data is not as well emphasised’

AS Rajgopal, CEO and Managing Director, Nextgen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies

“During the pandemic, we saw enormous excitement for healthcare. The success of the vaccines drove a lot of investment. As a result of everybody staying home, a lot of new market areas opened up… things like digital health, telemedicine, wearables for fitness, mental health app services, neurotechnology, continuous glucose monitors. What translated into India is only a tip of the iceberg,” said Rao.

Pooja Rao, co-founder and head of research and development at Qure.ai

On whether the right infrastructure is in place for digital growth, Rajgopal said that the infrastructure is curtailed to a few cities. The first step towards developing it would be to build a strong edge computing network, where data can be computed locally.

Benjamin Parkins

Regulations on data privacy and security should focus on putting the power back into the consumer’s hand, making sure the consumer is in complete control of their data, said Anandan. On privacy regulations, Rajgopal said, “It’s more about the growing professional ethic within the companies… global companies will start self-regulating. Government regulation will only catch up.” Rao added that the Personal Data Protection Bill has a lot of emphasis on physical localisation of data. “Clarity is lacking in terms of how this will be implemented,” said Rao.